


The Shadows our Souls Wear

by The_Carnivorous_Muffin



Series: Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus [43]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Child Abuse, Drama, F/M, Female Harry Potter, Friendship/Love, Master of Death Harry Potter, Narcissism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-23
Updated: 2018-08-22
Packaged: 2019-07-01 07:55:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15769827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Carnivorous_Muffin/pseuds/The_Carnivorous_Muffin
Summary: A story about Lily and her surprisingly human daemon, Lenin, what it means to be both great and terrible, and how to navigate through a world that doesn't seem inclined to remain sane.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Obligatory note that this is NOT CANON. Also consider this far more reliant on "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus" knowledge. So if you haven't read "His Dark Materials" you should be fine.

“I once had a daemon,”

 

She was eleven, teetering on the edge of adolescence to the very beginnings of maturity, and she was sitting on a bench in King’s Cross Station speaking to a man who had her eyes and her face but hair like ravens’ feathers, a man who claimed to be Death.

 

“Does death have a soul?”

 

He offered her a small, strained, smile, and in it was thousands of years of suffering.

 

“No, he doesn’t, but Harry Potter did, once.” Death paused then, pale fingers tapping against the stone of the bench, and he added, “It was the greatest gift I had ever received, and I would not even realize it until the very end.”

 

“He was like your daemon, your…”

 

“Lenin,” Lily filled in for him.

 

“Yes, your Lenin.” Death responded softly, tasting the name, “He was like your Lenin. Independent, stubborn, willful, and so very clever, much cleverer than I ever was. But of course, it was a he rather than a she… That was the first glaring sign that he was never mine to begin with. We’d have the worst fights sometimes, he never understood or even liked Ron or Hermione, and they always… doubted because of him. Even them, my greatest friends… Everyone thought I had an inner dark side, that I was some sort of a sexual deviant, or at the very least had an inner cynic.”

 

He gave a small laugh, a harsh dry thing, one that didn’t suit him, “Of course, they were wrong, he was the most human element of me. And… And of you.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“He isn’t yours, Lily,” he reached across for her hands, held them in his, and stared deep into her eyes, “You’ve always known deep down, you’ve kept track of the inconsistencies, the differences… He’s never been yours.”

 

* * *

 

She wasn’t entirely sure which of them had come to full consciousness first, whether it was him or her, of course he always claimed it was him but to Lily it’d seemed like they’d become, well, themselves, more or less around the same time.

 

It was a sharp jagged sort of thing, sentience, and not altogether that pleasant. Of course, there had been hints of it before, but just hints, just observations piled up together. It wasn’t until they were around three that it hit with the full weight of a logging truck.

 

And compared to Dudder’s and Buddy’s slow progression the differences were very clear.

 

Of course, with Lenin’s deep and utter contempt for Dudders and Buddy, for the fat little boy with his fat fuzzy little daemon that tried so hard to look so very intimidating, Lenin was all too glad that there appeared to be nothing in common between them.

 

(Lenin, frankly, would be pleased to be entirely inhuman if it meant that there was no way in hell for them to share any genetics with Dudders or any of the other Dursleys. Lily was never quite sure how she felt about that.)

 

Lily, on the other hand, was slightly more apprehensive about all of it. And at first, when they’d been in the house, it’d been ignorable. After all, the sample size was small, just her and Lenin, Dudders and Buddy, Vernon and his mule of a soul Sheila, and Petunia and the thin narrow eyed ferret Rowan, plus Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia barely counted being adults and their daemons long since settled, so really it was just her and Dudley. But then school started and… Well, it hadn’t been so easy to push to the side.

 

“They never talk, did you notice? Well, not them, their daemons. They chatter on, stutter, but the daemons… They don’t talk.”

 

Lily observed this from the back corner of the classroom, looking at the heads of all the children as they talked loudly with one another, sharing this and that, and barely seeming to have anything in common with Lily and Lenin at all.

 

“I imagine they have nothing to say,” Lenin commented with a shrug, or what amounted to a shrug in the form of a raven, shedding black feathers on her desk in his usual chronic irritation.

 

Children annoyed Lenin. 

 

No, strike that, everything annoyed Lenin, but he found children particularly irksome.

 

“And they’re… They’re soft, always rabbits, puppies, kittens…”

 

That wasn’t entirely true, there seemed to be some correlation between the intelligence and maturity of the child and the form of their daemon. The smarter ones, or the ones who seemed more with it, their daemons tended to cycle through more forms. They weren’t just mammals for comfort but frogs, birds, fish, nothing too impressive but certainly nothing as unimaginative as Buddy’s preferred forms of large dog, small dog, and fluffy bunny.

 

Adults, of course, didn’t count. Their daemons were static, fixed, they had a certain presence to them that came with having spent years as themselves, and thus hard to compare to the evanescent forms of a child’s soul.

 

Lenin glanced up, eyes black drops of ink in his skull, as he took in the chattering children, Dudley towards the front of the class sneering back as he caught Lenin’s glance even while Buddy shuffled almost unnoticeably in his golden lab form, uncomfortably. If ravens could smile, could have cutting jagged smiles without happiness, then she imagined Lenin’s beak would be curved into one now.

 

“Yes, it’s all very mundane isn’t it?” He turned his attention back to her, shifting as he did so into the form of a black cat, his eyes a green to match her own as he stretched and pawed at her papers, “Of course, this is why you should be so grateful you have me for a daemon rather than them. Can you imagine how dull it must be, being attached to that?”

 

“You wouldn’t envy them either, you would hate to be Dudder’s daemon, to be Buddy.”

 

The cat licked at its paw in indifference, rather like how Lily might examine her nails, and then said in his usual drawling dry tone, “Yes, that said, this is all a bit hypothetical. I am not their daemon nor could I ever be, similarly they are not my humans nor could they hope to be. We are two sides of a coin, Lily, you can’t have one without the other.”

 

She did imagine though, and she was grateful, because with the long hours in the cupboard it was hard to imagine anyone but Lenin beside her. Lenin who would take the form of a wolf with stained teeth and yellow eyes, filling the cupboard to the brim, and baring his teeth at Petunia’s entrance every morning as if he was merely biding his time before he went in for the kill.  

 

Still, they were different, and Dudders capitalized on that from the very beginning.

 

They were pushed to the back of every classroom with ease, the adults never said much, but the children certainly whispered. There were unconscious tells that daemons gave, in some ways it was much easier, much more accurate, to read a daemon than it was to read a face. Lily and Lenin made them nervous, even the adults, that more than Dudley calling her a crazy freak and pushing her or chasing her around with sticks, was the real clincher.

 

She’d understood for a very long time though that there was something fundamentally wrong with reality. It all looked very convincing, at a glance, but if you really thought about it and watched you would catch all the little inconsistencies thrown about.

 

Sometimes they were quite glaring like teleporting to the roof, turning her teacher’s hair blue, things breaking around her, but they also could be subtle and consistent. Lenin’s independent thought, his contradicting thoughts, his own range of emotions and feelings, his self-control, his wishes, his desires, and even his strange abilities…

 

But the more she thought about it, she wondered if it was truly her, and if it wasn’t them, everyone else, instead.

 

The fact of the matter was that everyone she’d ever met, the Dursleys in particular, were just a little flat by comparison, a tad bit unconvincing. Oh, they played the role with consistency, blathered on about her stupid drunk parents when appropriate, assigned her drudgery, threw her in the cupboard, but there was no purpose behind it, no rational reason that she could possibly come up with for their utter contempt.

 

They and their souls were a dream dreamt by no one.

 

Of course, Lenin had never agreed with this, since the first time she’d told him her theory about the glitches in the universe, and the unerringly false nature of the world they lived in.

 

“Lily, I’ve had to suffer through Dudley Dursley learning to talk, but believe me when I say that has to be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard you say.”

 

They were in the cupboard, (they were always in the cupboard) he was an anaconda, all green, silver, and gold, winding his way about her feet with a strangely lazy sort of impatience. As if he had all the time in the world to wait but would rather not.

 

She was curled in on herself, chin on her thin knees, staring at the dark wall littered with the few crayon drawings she had managed to sneak inside as if she could peer through them entirely and into the great cogs that made up reality.

 

They were younger then, only just beginning.

 

“And how are you so certain that everything is real, Lenin?”

 

“Because down that path lies madness and irrelevance. It doesn’t matter if it is real or if it is not, and because of that it might as well be real. It’s a pointless question.”

 

“But it changes, Lenin, even you have to admit it’s not consistent.”

 

He looked at her through hooded nonplussed eyes, painted an eerie and reptilian gold even in the dark, “They are consistently mediocre, we are consistently extraordinary, what is there to question?”

 

“Don’t you find it odd, how the world seems to bend itself around us?”

 

He curls himself around her, wrapping himself around her legs then her torso, his head moving so that his head is pressed against her ear, “No, because tell me, Lily, who else would it possibly bend for?”

 

And that’s what she would always think, that Lenin was her inner realist, that which bent to the pragmatic laws of reality, or at least respected them in some capacity. And it had seemed natural to her, he was her equal and opposite after all, all that which made her herself…

 

Why shouldn’t they disagree from time to time?

 

* * *

 

She wasn’t born Lily and he wasn’t born Lenin.

 

She’d been born Eleanor Lily Potter, mostly referred to as girl by the Dursleys, and Lenin, well, Lily actually had no idea what the hell he was supposed to be named growing up. The Dursleys rarely referred to her own name, there was no way in hell they were going to go about speaking to her daemon of all things.

 

People, as a general rule, were uncomfortable talking directly to someone’s daemon. It was considered not only intrusive but also instinctively uncomfortable. Instead there was this unwritten but universally understood rule that daemons spoke to other daemons and humans spoke to other humans.

 

Like most of these unwritten rules Lily had absolutely no idea they had existed until she’d gone out and broken all of them.

 

Because you could tell a lot about a man by the color of his daemon. And Lily felt that ignoring them, shifting her eyes and focusing on the human instead, was a very strange thing to do when their soul was sitting right there for the observing.

 

That, and Lenin had always demanded nothing less than everyone’s full attention, and in the very beginning she’d found it hard to understand that any other daemon would want it differently.

 

(Sometimes, she wondered if Lenin was really her daemon at all, and if instead wasn’t a person himself who just happened to be her daemon.)

 

At any rate, Lenin had always been a little put out by their lack of solid, respectable, names.

 

“Eleanor isn’t so bad, I suppose,” Cat again, irritated, eyes narrowed as he sat on the branch of a tree in the back yard with narrowed eyes that shifted from blue to green to back again, apparently undecided on a preferred color, “There are certainly worse names, but it’s also such an ordinary one, Ellie Potter… It hardly suits us.”

 

“And you don’t seem to have one at all,” Lily pointed out as she kneeled there grabbing at weeds with gritted teeth, knowing all too well that Aunt Petunia was watching from the kitchen to be sure Lily didn’t slack off while Dudley sat inside watching Saturday morning cartoons.

 

“No, it seems I’m beneath names entirely,” he agreed with a sniff of contempt as his eyes burned through the glass of Aunt Petunia’s window.

 

“Well, do you have any ideas?” Lily asked, and watched as he blinked, bristled, and shifted out of his cat’s form into a blue bird, a strange and unusually optimistic form for him (he seemed to have this obsession with dark or else terrifying things and only on especially rare occasions took the form of anything anyone else would remotely call pleasant).

 

“Something rarer than Ellie, something memorable, extraordinary, something that fits…” He trailed off, eyeing her critically with a cocked head, “How about Persephone, for the Greek goddess of Spring and queen of the underworld?”

 

“Good god no,” Lily said, shuddering slightly, because while she might not have gotten along with her peers she was all too aware that going by a name like Persephone was going to get her nowhere fast.

 

That and she couldn’t take it seriously.

 

“Why don’t we try you first, since you seem to be getting nowhere with mine?” Lily said, hoping to divert him before he got too insulted, but it was apparently a bit late for that.

 

“I was going to suggest Hades or Pluto for my own, since we were running with a theme, but it seems you’ve entirely…”

 

“I can’t call you Hades,” Lily scoffed and momentarily forgot about her weeding, “Have you ever heard of a daemon called Hades? Because I haven’t, and if I did then I’d never be able to take them seriously.”  

 

“Then what can you take seriously, Ellie?” And there he was spitting out Ellie like it practically burned, like that was the grossest insult anyone could ever offer them, when, really, she had never minded it too much.

 

Because most of the time the Dursleys didn’t even really use it.

 

She paused, thinking, and felt herself thinking through all of the names rattling around in her brain, “Oh, I don’t know, uh, what about Napoleon?”

 

“Napoleon?”

 

Lily nodded and shrugged as she began to pull out a truly stubborn weed, “Sure, you’re Napoleon and I’m that other guy… Wellington.”

 

“Wellington and Napoleon, really, that’s what you come up with? Why on earth do you think those names are any more respectable?”

 

Lily stared down at her red hands in distaste, already hurting despite having half of the yard left to do, “I don’t know… It fits.”

 

Lenin took this moment to change back into a hissing cat, hair bristling as he glared down at her with his tail raised, “It fits? Tell me, how does it possibly fit?”

 

“It fits you,” she paused, and felt that her words were somehow weighted even as she said them, “This place… This is your Elba, isn’t it? You’re stuck here, with me, longing for glory and revolution on this island in the suburbs.”

 

She paused then, somehow picturing him not as a daemon, but a man in his own right with his own python daemon curled over his shoulders, staring out the windows at the darkened English countryside as his own bitter hatred and determination stared back at him.

 

“No, that’s not quite right, you haven’t done it yet… You’re still waiting for the revolution, egging it on, willing for it to happen… You’re Lenin.”

 

“And if I’m this… Lenin, then who are you supposed to be? Trotsky?”

 

She stared up at him for a moment, and somehow felt the answer at the tip of her tongue, in spite of it having not been anywhere near there before that moment, “No, of course not, I’m Lily.”

 

* * *

 

And they had their dreams then, of great and terrible things, and somehow they’d managed to convince themselves that it was as easy as that.

 

It wasn’t.


	2. Chapter 2

“What did you call him, Death?”

 

Death glanced down at her, raised dark eyebrows, not quite a Lenin-esque expression but certainly well on its way to becoming one. His eyes though were softer than Lenin’s typically were, than Lenin ever allowed himself to be. Lenin was always so sharp, so very dangerous, as if merely skimming your fingers across his surface would cut them right off.

 

Death was more like Lily, he was fluid, changing consistency without seeming to change at all.

 

Lily supposed it was natural, given that she was supposed to be like him, perhaps even to be him in some other world.

 

Still, without a Lenin of his own to judge him by there was something so eerily off balance about him, entirely inhuman.

 

Soulless.

 

“Your Lenin,” Lily clarified when Death didn’t respond, “Your not-daemon, I mean.”

 

“Oh, right,” Death paused, considered her question, eyes dimming as he reflected on half-buried memories, “Well, he was supposed to be Rose, actually.”

 

“Rose?” Lily asked, almost falling out of her seat as she tried to picture Lenin with a name like Rose.

 

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet…

 

Even feeding him lines of Shakespeare would not get Lenin to take that any better.

 

“I know,” Death said, lips twitching upwards, “He was very offended when we found out. The Dursleys never called him that, didn’t refer to him as anything really, which perhaps was natural as he was the most obvious sign of my freakishiness…”

 

The smile dimmed slightly, and he paused, the silence lingering on that last hauntingly familiar word, then he casually continued, “To be honest we could never quite decide on one. He seemed to change it every other week, and he had the most pretentious taste… We could never agree, because I’d be damned if I’d be sounding like Malfoy and having some three-syllable mythological name for my soul and he’d be damned if I gave him something Hagrid could easily pronounce.”

 

A pause, then something jaded in his green eyes, something piercing as he looked through her and to all the potential she had, “I regret that, you know, I wish I had something definitive to call him now that he’s gone.”

 

It was funny, how much the absence of a soul was so much more noticeable than the presence of one, as if by ceasing to exist Death’s unnamed, borrowed, soul held that much more weight. And if, by his mere lack of presence, Lily’s hold on Lenin was that much more tenuous and uncertain.

 

* * *

 

 

Lily and Lenin almost left the Dursleys, once, early into their primary education.

 

There were vague half-baked plans to see the world, to travel to China, Egypt, America, and everywhere in between. To go north to see the inflated northern lights which had once been a gateway to another world, to see the great bears, as well as the witches.

 

And they’d never once bother looking back on the London suburb of Little Whinging.

 

But plans fall through, and in the end, Lily always felt it was something of a long and rather anticlimactic story.

 

* * *

 

 

There was a certain progression to the development of humanity, things that every human would do, or attempt to do, at some point in their lives.

 

Of course, Dudley Dursley was Lily’s only example of seeing it up close and personal so perhaps she was getting the wrong idea (which was entirely plausible since Dudders had always seemed… thicker than your average human), but all the same there did seem to be definitive expected milestones.

 

At some point, long after Lily had mastered the art of maneuvering (and had then been screamed at for daring to do so long before Diddykins), Dudders toddled to his feet with a happy puppy version of Buddy weaving her way in and out of Dudley’s feet, even going so far as to trip Dudley every two seconds.

 

(Lenin always felt there was something ironic in a daemon being so stupid as to cause her own human to fall repeatedly. Something ironic, pitiable, but more than anything else contemptable and perhaps a commentary on society.

 

Lily wouldn’t necessarily go that far, but as a newly sentient three-year-old she’d always wondered how long it would take Buddy to catch on to the fact that maybe moving right between Dudley’s unsteady legs was not a good idea. It took a worryingly long time.)

 

Dudley, at some other point, also learned how to say words, then speak in halting sentences, then finally make his way to complete sentences. Then they’d gone off to school and Dudley did his darnedest (well, when he wasn’t watching television or poking Lily with sticks) to write and read simple sentences.

 

And this seemed to be how the human race sort of went as a whole, granted Lily seemed to have skipped half of it, but it seemed like this was ‘how it was done’.

 

Another one, that Lily saw attempted every now and then on the playground, oftentimes with friends jeering, encouraging, and comparing all around, was to discover if you were a witch, or, in other words, to see just how far you dared to let your soul wander from you.

 

Dudley’s first attempt was with that scrawny skinny boy who lived next door, the one Lenin always reminded her was called Piers, who Dudley liked to bring along for ‘Ellie Hunting’ when Dudley wanted to pretend he wasn’t terrified witless by Lenin and needed someone to desperately impress.

 

(A word, a jagged fat grin, and then Buddy and Piers’ daemon Juniper turned into great hounds pawing at the earth and growling across at Lily, but they were the hounds of the civilized world, Lenin’s wolf form always had something fey to him, something darker and older and harkening back to far more dangerous hunts than the mortal kind.

 

And even in his meager attempt at intimidation, something in Buddy always cowered before Lenin’s piercing wolf’s eyes.)

 

But they weren’t Ellie hunting that day, they weren’t even really looking at her or at Lenin in his python form curled about her neck as she stared half-lidded at the park. No, instead, interestingly enough, they were talking about daemons.

 

“They say that some people’s daemons, shamans and witches and whatever, can go as far away as they’d like and don’t even feel a thing,” Piers was saying, Juniper a twitching, shifty eyed rabbit in his hands, snuffling at Piers’ dirty fingertips as he absently petted her.

 

Juniper was always twitchy around Buddy, never seeming to notice just how lazy Buddy had become, that her and Dudley’s bulk was little more than a show. While Lenin’s lean muscles and towering form, his snarling rage and knife like eyes, were the things to truly fear.

 

“No way,” Dudders said with a resounding harrumph of agreement from Buddy, “My dad says that’s just new age hippie freak stuff.”

 

“No, it’s real D,” Piers insisted with large eyes, his daemon with equally large eyes as she nodded in agreement, “I’ve seen it on the tele!”

 

“That’s all just camera tricks,” Dudley said, “What, are you stupid?”

 

“No, it wasn’t, there was a real live witch from the north and she went on the tele and they showed her daemon, some kind of a long-legged bird, take off and he didn’t come back! He flew miles away and brought back a ribbon to even prove it!”

 

“It’s true,” Juniper started, only to stop when Buddy offered her a baleful glare.

 

“And I’m telling you there’s no way!” Dudley insisted, his eyes darker, and Buddy growing agitated beside him. Uncle Vernon wasn’t even there and already Dudley was acting like he was sitting in his shadow, just waiting for the belt to come down, the punishment that Dudley only ever received when the m-word was involved.

 

There were things Uncle Vernon didn’t approve of, things that everyone knew existed but he still insisted on denying or at least claiming them as unnatural, things like the northern witches, the bears, and more than anything in the world magic itself.

 

It was just too bad they lived so close to London, because of Lyra Belacqua, who had statues all over Oxford as well as in the city of London itself, and the extremely documented histories of her excursions to the north and then further to entirely different worlds, it made things like witches and magic almost undeniable.

 

And it made Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia look really stupid.

 

Although they did have a point in that such magic, wild magic like that, was best searched for in exotic and out of the way places. London had lost touch with such things.

 

But Piers didn’t know any of that, instead, his eyes narrowed and he blurted, “You’re just scared.”

 

This was a stupid thing to say, although it was undoubtedly true. Dudley stood, fists balled up, looking two seconds away from punching his friend in the face, “I’m not scared!”

 

“You’re just a scaredy-cat!” Piers insisted, also scrambling to his feet, and Juniper changing with him into a smug and mocking alley cat, carefully keeping out of the way of Buddy’s teeth.

 

“I said I’m not scared!”

 

And it was at this point that Lily and Lenin really started to get interested, if only because it looked like there really was going to be a fist fight. Lenin unwound himself from Lily’s neck, changed form beside her into a grinning jackal, and said, “My money’s on the scrappy skinny one.”

 

Lily grimaced, because her money was on him too, if only because she knew exactly how long Dudley would last if this came down to a real fight rather than just sort of slapping at each other and calling the other one names.

 

That, and, in the end most fights were decided by the determination of the daemon. In a fight, a true fight, Lily always one against Dudley not because of his side but because Lenin fought dirty and fought long past anyone’s breaking point. And whenever Buddy felt Lenin’s jaws closing in on her neck, felt the force of those jagged teeth and pointed claws, she always caved.

 

The fact that Lily was much smaller than Dudley, could easily be overwhelmed by his weight and size, had nothing to do with it.

 

(The trick, Mr. Potter, is not minding that it hurts.)

 

Dudley had never learned that, but fortunately for him, none of the others had either. So perhaps, if this was just going to be Dudley throwing his weight around (which he was admittedly quite skilled at), then he had more than a fair shot.

 

“Then prove it, scaredy-cat! Let’s see how far Buddy can go! I bet you Juniper can go further!”

 

“No way!” Dudley screamed and then locked eyes with his daemon, his daemon nodding back, and then slowly but uncertainly walking away from Dudley. At the same time Piers’ daemon also took off.

 

For a moment there was confidence on both their ends, as the line between boy and daemon remained unstrained, but slowly that confidence wavered and soon tension grew in all of their bodies, like an inviable string connecting each boy and their daemon had grown taut, then, abruptly, both daemons stopped dead in their tracks.

 

There was a moment of horrified, tense silence, the feeling of having gone too far, and then the daemons were rushing back to their humans and falling into their arms, the boys shaking and even going so far as to cry.

 

And so Lily and Lenin just watched as Dudley and Piers sat there, sobbing over nothing.

 

Lily, for her own part, had no idea what the hell she’d just witnessed, “They’re crying.”

 

Lenin apparently had nothing to say, his jackal face struck dumb, struck dumb enough that he even shifted into a wide-eyed tree frog, stop sign red eyes set at odd angles, an expression of perfect obliviousness on his face.

 

“…If they’re both crying then did the skinny one win?” Lily asked, because she honestly couldn’t tell, couldn’t tell even as Dudley and Piers were both attempting to reprove their masculinity and pretend that the crying episode wasn’t happening (which, of course, was a bit unsuccessful since they were both still sobbing).

 

“You know Lily, I don’t know,” Lenin finally said, “I don’t think I want to either.”

 

“Right,” Lily concluded dumbly, “We’ve gone farther than that before.”

 

It was a really pathetic distance, they hadn’t even made it to the other end of the clearing in the park before they’d had to go back. Hell, Uncle Vernon had locked Lenin out of the house before and had him chained to a fence as punishment for freak behavior, and Dudley was crying over half of a clearing in a park.

 

Lily didn’t know whether to find it sad or vaguely funny.

 

“Clearly, Lily, Dudley Dursley is the pinnacle of humanity,” Lenin offered wryly, although to be fair, it wasn’t like Lily or Lenin had ever met anyone that much better in person. No, the great humans that Lenin so admired were all locked in printed pages, dead, or trapped behind the pixels of the television screen.

 

Lily’s world was a small one.

 

Lily grimaced, “But crying?”

 

“He once cried because he said you burnt his bacon,” Lenin noted, which, was untrue technically, well there had been tears, but mostly Dudders just screamed at her that she’d done the breakfast wrong and there just happened to be tears in his eyes.

 

“In public though, with one of his cronies,” Lily noted before concluding, “He’ll lose all respect if he keeps this up. I’d never respect him if I ever witnessed this.”

 

“Well good news for us,” Lenin said, “Mindless sycophants in training like Piers only make him more tiresome.”

 

 “…Except he’s also crying,” Lily noted.

 

“Yes,” Lenin agreed rather dimly, “Yes, he is, isn’t he?”

 

It was around then, staring as the two boys composed themselves, pretending it all never happened in the first place, that the idea seemed to occur to both Lily and Lenin at the same time. They looked at each other, red eyes meeting green, and Lily noted slowly, “I’ve… never felt the strain, have you?”

 

But she knew he hadn’t, and they had been separated before, forcibly, spending hours apart from one another but even then, while there had been a hollow dull fear it had not been heart wrenching, it had not reduced her to panicked tears in an instant.

 

Her string, that invisible string connecting her and Lenin, was far laxer than that.

 

He didn’t say anything, didn’t need to, instead shifted into the form of a falcon, nodding at her, tensing his muscles as he prepared to take flight before glancing at her, uncertainly, and offering, “I’ll come back… I’ll tell you how far and I’ll come back.”

 

And then he was off.

 

She wouldn’t see him again until the next morning, sitting outside the doorstep to Number 4 Privet drive in the well-worn form of the wild faerie hunting wolf, a great jagged grin greeting her as she and Dudley stepped out for school and Aunt Petunia screamed and hit the back of her head for her freakishness which was “even worse than my freak of a sister’s”.

 

* * *

 

 

Of course, right away they started planning, not the full thing, not everything it would be, but the small individual puzzle pieces began to make themselves known.

 

That very morning, during reading time, Lily and Lenin snuck into the back corner and whispered to each other while Lily flicked through ‘1984’ a book that had earned her rather suspicious and leery looks from her teacher.

 

Not enough to interrupt though, no, never enough for that, just enough to make her spaniel daemon twitch.

 

“Do you think I’m a witch?” Lily asked, fingers absently tracing Orwell’s descriptions of newspeak as she stared Lenin in the eye, “Or that our mother was a witch?”

 

Lenin nodded slowly, uncertainly, but with growing confidence as the words sunk in, pacing back and forth in the form of a regal leopard, “Yes, that must be it… It’s genetic, and passed down through the female line, she must have thought you were a son somehow or else died and gave us to our paternal relatives.”

 

“What would a witch be doing in a car?” Lily asked, thinking back on the death that the Dursleys had always given her no good dead drunk parents.

 

“Obviously, Lily, she wasn’t,” Lenin spat, “You’d never hear Vernon or Petunia telling us that our witch mother died in some glorious battle… No doubt this is why he’s so twitchy about witches and magic and everything freakish we possess.”

 

Lenin’s expression darkened then, “But why would she have left us with them? Why wouldn’t she have given us to her sisters to raise?”

 

Witch, a northern witch… Somehow it didn’t taste right, even then, it was too… Convenient Lily supposed. More, it only explained a single symptom, and there was more to Lenin and Lily than that, far more.

 

“What sort of bird do you think you’ll be?” Lily asked instead, jolting Lenin from his dark musings, “A crow?”

 

“What?” Lenin asked.

 

“Witches’ daemons are always birds,” Lily noted, “What sort of a bird do you think you’ll settle as?”

 

Lenin opened his mouth, then hesitated, “I… I don’t know. I don’t feel…”

 

Like a bird, Lily finished for him inside of her head. No, he really didn’t, he wore the form of birds sporadically, different types here and there, although he favored ravens and crows for whatever morbid reason but it usually was out of convenience or temporary curiosity. He rarely looked comfortable with wings.

 

“I should go,” Lenin suddenly interjected, his eyes brightening as he straightened, “Get out of here, out of Surrey and see the world and everything we’re missing while we’re trapped in this god forsaken place. You should have seen it Lily, London… I saw Buckingham Palace and Westminster, the Thames and Trafalgar Square, and no one even blinked at the sight of me.”

 

Lily had never been to London before. The Dursleys had taken Dudley, but never her, and she wondered if they ever would. They’d never said it before but both she and Lenin had been resigned to being stuffed inside Little Whinging until they were eighteen and thrown out of the house.

 

On the wall of Lily’s cupboard there were thin scratch marks from Lenin’s claws, marking up the days until their eighteenth birthday, when they could go and capture the world for themselves.

 

“I’ll see Paris, Berlin, perhaps even Athens and Alexandria… I’ll see all the wonders of the world and…”

 

And Lily cut him off, “And you’ll fly back and tell me all about them while I rot in Surrey.”

 

It wasn’t said with any bitterness, just a sort of hollow resignation, that same resignation that had haunted her through the night when he hadn’t returned, the thought that this was the way things were now, perhaps the way things had always been.

 

Even her own soul abandoned her.

 

Lenin rubbed his spotted head against her and said quietly, “No, no, I will go see, go scout, find out what happened to our mother, our real mother and not whatever concocted one the Dursleys spoon fed to us, and then we will both travel one day.”

 

Lily said nothing to this or to the confidence in his voice, that unspoken insistence of being two halves of the same whole, but did quietly ask, “And how are we going to manage this? They won’t take kindly to you simply disappearing.”

 

He paused then, this small reality sinking into him, and then he shrunk into himself back into the form of his bitter black cat, “We’ll think of something.”

 

But all the same, all throughout the day, his eyes constantly drifted to the window.

 

(This did not make him a blackbird though.)

 

* * *

 

 

There were two interpretations of the myth of Narcissus.

 

In one, the classic interpretation, the man stumbled upon his own reflection and fell in love with his face in the water while his daemon, Echo, faded into oblivion, only a warped husk of her, bent into the shape of a wood nymph, left behind.

 

In the other, Narcissus’ daemon took the form of a golden haired, woman, with his face and his eyes, and thus Narcissus fell in love with himself.

 

* * *

 

 

There was a natural progression to humanity, walking, stumbling, testing your limits…

 

Lily skipped some of it entirely, and some of it she touched what others wouldn’t dare. Lily spoke to daemons, she sent her soul willingly across the world to see the Ganges for her, so perhaps it was natural that one night, alone in the cupboard beneath the stairs, thinking of everything they had yet to see and everything they were and weren’t, that they’d try it.

 

He was a tiger, golden eyes glowing, dark stripes blending into the shadows while the red seemed to glow in what little light there was, and her pale hand stroked through his fur with a continual ease and steadiness.

 

“How do you think it was decided, Lenin?” she mused, “That I’d be the girl and you’d be the daemon?”

 

“I don’t know,” he said, and she wondered oddly, how he might look with eyebrows that he could raise at her, instead of only a voice by which to express himself with human means, “A divine coin toss perhaps?”

 

“There is no god,” Lily said absently, because while many denied this it had been well documented, the angels had lied to them for thousands of years.

 

“No, certainly not that god at the very least,” Lenin agreed, “Perhaps something else though…”

 

“It seems unfair, that I’m the girl and you’re the soul,” Lily said before stating, “I think you would have made a better human than me.”

 

He understood them so much better than she did, almost instinctively while she continually struggled on with him as her translator… It was as if she watched the world through a window, through thick panes of glass, seeing everything but always outside of it, and never close enough to be truly immersed.

 

Lenin never seemed to have that issue.

 

“Lenin and his daemon Lily?” he asked, a quirk of a smile in his voice as he turned to stare at her fully with his inscrutable predator’s eyes.

 

“You don’t like it?” Lily asked.

 

“Well, I wouldn’t be Lenin, for one thing.” Lenin said with a scoff, “I’d have whatever boring name these people thrust upon me. Tom, Dick, or even Harry.”

 

Lily nodded, “And I probably wouldn’t have a name at all.”

 

“I’d name you,” Lenin said with a shrug of his great, powerful, shoulders.

 

“Yes, I remember, Persephone,” Lily said with a shudder, perhaps it was better for her to be the person after all, because that really was just too much. Someone clearly had to keep Lenin in check.

 

The conversation for anyone else, for anyone who was not them, would have ended amicably there as Lily drifted off silently to sleep. It didn’t though, they stared at each other, gold and green clashing…

 

And it was wordless, the idea, boundless and out of nothing itself, revolving around Lenin the boy and his daemon Lily. And then shuddering, shaking, and edging his toe over a line never to be crossed, Lenin hesitated and then without even blinking he stepped over and took the plunge.

 

The tiger shrunk, limbs disappearing in on themselves, orange and black fading into a pale and luminescent white, and then there was a boy, a boy with dark curly hair, pale and delicate features which almost mirrored her own, dark lashes kissing high cheek bones, eyes a strange mix of pale blue and green, almost jade in color, and a pale, thin, and fey naked boy’s body with long delicate fingers which reached out for her face with uncertainty.

 

And suddenly she could read his expression, more than his body language she could read his face, the uncertainty, the fear, the trepidation, but also the curious wonder as his fingers reached out to brush her cheek, and then her shoulders and he pulled her into an embrace, his lips lingering in her hair.

 

His lips twisted into a smile and he began to breathlessly laugh, shaking even as she tentatively reached up to grip his pale shoulders with her own hands, their skin tone matching perfectly.

 

“Lenin?”

 

“…I…” he trailed off, started again, pressing his forehead to hers and closing his eyes, that rueful smile still on his face, “I don’t feel like a Harry. Do I look like one?”

 

Her hands drifted to his face, she cupped his cheeks, drew him back so she could look him those eyes, which were a mix of her own and something else, something unfamiliar but still so very him.

 

And even though there was something so very blasphemous in him right then, so tender and abominable, she couldn’t help but miss it completely as she stared at him and all he could have been, perhaps even should have been if the world was a fair place and she was the tiger in his cupboard and the anaconda around his neck.

 

“No, you look… You look like you, like a revolutionary.”

 

And with each time later, that he took the form of the Lenin that might have been, it somehow seemed less and less extraordinary, until it was almost natural.

 

Almost.

 

* * *

 

 

Reality was fickle, it always had been fickle, and as Lenin seemed to break all the rules Lily realized that perhaps breaking the rules herself was as easy as simply wanting to do it.

 

When she wanted to be ignored, she was, when she wanted something to appear, it did, when she wanted to make a fake daemon to keep everyone entertained for a little while…

 

Well, then there didn’t seem to be any reason to say no.

 

* * *

 

 

Lily and Lenin, in the middle of the school day at some forgotten edge of the playground, hidden in the shadows and out of sight, Lenin holding her as her dark-haired twin, Lily’s jacket temporarily draped over him but doing little to stop the goose bumps rising on his flesh.

 

They’d look very inappropriate if anyone was glancing in their direction, thankfully, everyone seemed suitably or forcibly distracted by other things. Lily had to hand it to Obi-Wan Kenobi, the man really knew his stuff.

 

“I’ll head to London first,” he said, “I’ll send a postcard when I get there, make sure the Dursleys don’t get the mail. I’ll go see Stonehenge and Bath, I’ll see Scotland, and then I’ll take a ferry to Ireland to. I’ll only be a week at most, I promise.”

 

“I know,” Lily said, and it was getting easier to say, easier to imagine waiting for him to come back, because he would come back, she knew it.

 

Half of his eyes were hers after all.

 

“Then I’ll come back and I’ll tell you everything, and next time, next time I’ll take the ferry to France across the channel and I’ll go see the continent.”

 

“Next time though,” Lily mused and he nodded.

 

“Yes,” he pulled back, grinning at her, his wide and exuberant smile matching hers exactly, “Next time.”

 

And then he was shifting, twisting into the shape of an eagle, and he was flying up into the sky and out of sight. And, Lily, staring after him, idly turned the dust, the air, the pollen around her into the shape of a white, dark eyed, twitching rabbit that no one would even blink at.

 

And she wondered if it should alarm her that she appeared to be so good at making things out of nothing, when even the god that hadn’t really been a god hadn’t been capable of that.


	3. Chapter 3

“In some ways, Lily, it was easier when he was gone,” Death said, “People assumed I was a shaman, well later, at the time they always figured it was just the next step in the legend of the boy who lived or a consequence of… Well, it’s hardly important now. What I think of most now, when I think of it at all, is that Hermione, Ron, and eve Ginny seemed almost… relieved, when he disappeared. And for a while, for a very long time, I was relieved too.”

 

* * *

 

 

It ended up being a few minutes shy of seven days, and only then, she suspected, because he had set himself that limit. If he had given himself two weeks, a month, or even all the school year she would have been waiting until that last moment for him to appear.

 

As it was, his post card from London arrived halfway through the week, a picture of a double decker bus printed on the front and elegant writing, far more elegant than Dudley’s or even Lily’s for that matter, on the back in looping paragraphs.

 

And he seemed…

 

Happy.

 

Sitting in the cupboard, the fake daemon placed onto her mattress snuffling as it stared at her with those wide unblinking dark eyes, she read through again and again but that sense didn’t change. He seemed happy, somewhere in that black ink, in the descriptions of the people and the museums and the sheer history of the great city of London, was joy.

 

She tried to remember if he had ever once seemed happy before.

 

Lily, among the pair of them, had always been the one more prone to optimism, a little bit more untethered off the ground, while he himself had been firmly grounded and firmly cynical even from the start. He’d come into the world hating all of it, or at least, for as long as Lily could remember.

 

Until that first post card.

 

Lily, sitting there with the fake daemon, which she’d taken to referring as Rabbit, the soulless abomination and mockery of a human soul, sat and wondered if she had ever been truly as happy as he seemed to be.

 

Still, on the seventh day, waiting in the playground there was a somehow familiar eagle in the sky and then, a grinning, laughing, boy as he landed and grabbed her into his arms, twirling her about even as Lily sent out her will to deflect everyone’s eyes elsewhere.

 

Because sometimes, it seemed, that Lenin forgot that going without pants on a jungle cat was all well and good but quite a different story for a little boy.

 

“Oh, Lily, I wish you could have been there with me,” Lenin declared later, after school had ended and they were back in the cupboard again, and for the first time Lily could possibly recall, Lenin didn’t seem to mind the cramped quarters. Instead, in the form of the pale dark-haired boy again (and was it strange that he kept gravitating to that now, as if acclimatizing himself to the taboo of it, testing the waters one foot at a time and going deeper and deeper), Lily’s male alter-ego as it were, Lenin’s jade eyes sparked and his hands gestured about like overexcited doves, “The sheer history, Lily, in London, in The British Museum for that matter. It just shows… Well how large the world is, how much larger it is than Little Whinging, and filled with wonders we never considered.”

 

Well, to be fair, Lily did read, and she watched documentaries and movies whenever she got the chance. So it wasn’t like she and Lenin had been wholly ignorant of the outside world, of the fact that the world was not comprised of the suburbs of London, but still, she doubted Lenin wanted to be reminded of that.

 

“And the land itself, the rolling hills of the countryside and the forests that remain…” he shook his head, and how odd that still was, that he could and would take this alien human form with such ease, almost appearing in a daze, “I… I never realized how beautiful the world was.”

 

“Well, I’m glad you had fun,” Lily said, clapping her hands together, “And glad you’re back, the fake daemon, well… People are starting to ask if you’ve settled unseasonably early… And if I’m mentally handicapped.”

 

Rabbit… Well, there were dull daemons, and then there was Rabbit. For something Lily had summoned or pulled or did whatever with out of thin air it really was quite miraculous. However, it never seemed to… do anything. It just kind of sat there, twitching, occasionally blinking. Even Buddy, at least, would move and talk and showed some (small, infinitesimally small) signs of intelligence.

 

Generally, when you saw a daemon acting like Rabbit, it meant that the human they belonged to usually was in some kind of a coma.

 

Lenin spared a pair of raised eyebrows towards the Rabbit then back to Lily, then back to Rabbit, “The fact that people can mistake that thing, for me… No, I’ve stopped wondering at the height of human stupidity.”

 

He still looked insulted, which was probably fair, since Lily had started to earn some very concerned looks from her teacher as the week progressed and Rabbit… rabbited. He didn’t even change forms once, not one time, just…

 

All the same, there was something about Rabbit that just… unnerved her.

 

“Either way, I won’t be here long, a week is really too short even for an island as small as this one, I didn’t even get to the cliffs of Dover…”

 

“Oh, right, of course, I’ll… stay here, then,” Lily interjected, trying to understand why she felt… He was her, in every sense of the term, and his seeing the world was her seeing the world, so really it was to the benefit of the combined being they called Eleanor Lily Potter.

 

All the same…

 

Still, wordlessly, as he looked at her, it was more than clear that he understood what she couldn’t even bring herself to say.

 

“Lily I… I can’t stay here,” Lenin paused, and it was horrifying, how his human face made his emotions that much clearer, her emotions in a roundabout sense, as they had always seemed at least partially hidden when he wore a long-coiled body of a serpent or the eyes of an irritable black cat, “This place will destroy us, Lily, inch by inch… Thirteen years is too long, far too long.”

 

He meant it, she could see it, and he was right, thirteen years was almost three times longer than they had been alive. All the same, all the same, the words slipped out of her mouth, “Half here, Lenin, is still here.”

 

You could have heard a pin dropping.

 

Slowly, the form of the boy unwound, a serpent took its place, winding up her neck, and then, hissing in her ear, “Then we’ll both go, this time, I promise, Lily, we’ll both go.”

 

* * *

 

 

For a little while, before they planned and researched and even thought about leaving, they dreamed out the future. How first, first they would go to London as Lenin had done, and he’d show her everything he’d seen for himself. Then, they’d travel the whole island then over to Ireland, and then to the continent…

 

And, he in the form of a fierce lion, in his yellow eyes she’d seen some bright inner fire, the fire of her own soul, burning…

 

* * *

 

 

The next time he left it wasn’t nearly so far and wasn’t quite so exciting. Instead of playing tourist he went about Surrey then London during the day, returning home every night, inspecting foster homes and orphanages. She imagined he took the forms of spiders, flies, and moths as he read of papers and made his way through nooks and crannies and peered with too many eyes into the faces of children.

 

“Children,” he said after the first time, expanding into the form of a ragged coyote whose yellow eyes practically burned with irritation, “Are disgusting.”

 

“The ones at school aren’t…”

 

“Oh, but we don’t live with the ones at school,” Lenin cut her off as he shook himself, “And even then, even in the classroom you catch them eating paste out of the containers. Oh but, like Dudley, behind closed doors they reveal themselves for what they truly are.”

 

Then nodding his head towards Rabbit, he said, “Let me put it like this, your cheap imitation of me over there, if he was only slightly less catatonic, and was covered in snot and drool, would have fit right in.”

 

Still, he kept going, and by about the third time he acknowledged a pattern, a strange elusive truth that neither of them had guessed for years.

“We’re being abused,” he said it so calmly, and yet with an undertone of solidified belief, as if only now had this earth-shattering realization come together.

 

They were sitting outside, on the roof, Lenin returning and insisting (in a tone not to be reckoned with) they not spend another moment in the cupboard, and with the sound of his roaring voice in the form of a tiger Lily hadn’t thought to argue, so flying on Lenin’s back as he took the form of some strange, majestic, and frankly oversized bird, they’d sat up there and stared at the overcast night sky, towards the lights of London.

 

“What?” Lily asked, eyebrows raised, and then scoffed, “Come off it…”

 

“Lily, they put us in a cupboard, and they barely feed us,” he said, and there was a dangerous undertone to that quiet voice, even as he shifted into his human form, his face so perfectly still and pale as his eyes seemed to burn, and even without any clothes the fire of his anger seemed to keep him from shivering, “At every home I’ve been to, they are treated better than we are, it’s crowded, true, and filled with emotionally unstable brats of all ages, but they’re fed, they sleep in a room with a bed and a window, and they aren’t put to work in a garden and their mothers aren’t called whores and their fathers aren’t called drunkards.”

 

“But they don’t… They don’t hit us…”

 

“Oh, but Uncle Vernon’s belted us more than once,” Lenin’s voice grew louder, he still wasn’t looking at her, instead staring with rage out towards London, “And let’s not forget Dudley, he certainly makes sure we remember our place.”

 

Then, interlacing his fingers together and leaning forward on top of them, he said, “I want them to go to jail, Lily. I want to see that fat bastard of an uncle go to prison and get shanked. I want to see our rake thin aunt penniless and forced into wandering the streets. I want Dudders sent off to a foster home to get the shit beat out of him by juvies twice his age and size. I want to see them lose everything and for everyone in Privet Drive to know it.”

 

He turned to look at her then, and how did he look her age yet so much older in the same moment, how did he burn with such anger, “I want to destroy them.”

 

“But if we don’t live with the Dursleys then…”

 

“I don’t care if we’re shoved into a foster home with twelve other children,” Lenin said, shaking his head, “I don’t care if we end up on the streets, we’ll survive, I know it. Lily, we can’t let this slide, we’ve let it go for long enough.”

 

“…If,” Lily started, holding up a hand before Lenin could interrupt, “If we are being abused by the Dursleys, then… Why hasn’t anyone done anything about it?”

 

From what Lily generally understood, there were laws against things like that, granted she didn’t really know the details but the idea was that if you were unfit for having children they were taken away from you. Granted, Lily wasn’t necessarily sold on this abuse thing, it wasn’t anything she or Lenin hadn’t been able to handle for years, but by the look he was giving her he was anything but impressed.

 

“Because humans are corrupt, worthless, piles of garbage who will do nothing to help even an abused little girl if the evidence isn’t undeniable even to a dullard!” Lenin shouted then threw his hands into the air giving a great bark of rage and despair, “Everyone worth meeting Lily, is already dead, or never existed in the first place…”

 

He sighed, wrapping his arms around his torso, goosebumps finally appearing on his pale skin as he huddled in on himself, “We’ll just have to make it that obvious.”

 

“Well,” Lily said blandly as she stared out to the horizon, “That’s not ominous, or anything…”

 

That, at least, managed to get a laugh or two out of him.

 

* * *

 

 

Of the two of them, if anyone considered Lily and Lenin as a pair at all, if they dared to consider them, as Lenin might say, one might conclude that Lenin was the rational realist.

 

And this was true, to a point, certainly Lenin believed it and told her it often enough, but sometimes, sometimes Lily didn’t wonder if it wasn’t her trying to keep her passionate, fiery, overzealous, and sometimes terrifying soul firmly grounded in the reality they lived in.

 

Because Lenin seemed to forget every now and then.

 

* * *

 

 

“Alright, it says here… Lily, would you stop watching that goddamn rabbit and pay attention already!”

 

Lily jerked her head towards him, keeping Rabbit in her periphery as they sat in the school library, Lenin in human form to more easily flip through pages, dressed in her own clothing, with a borrowed psychology text book from the much larger public library, although how he’d managed to con the system into granting him a library account without a parent or a daemon to accompany him was nothing short of miraculous.

 

“I think… I think I may have made a mistake with the rabbit,” Lily whispered over to him, “It… I think it eats things.”

 

“What does that have to do with anything?” Lenin whispered in frustration back, “And why do I care?”

 

“Well, that’s the thing, things keep… disappearing. Or not always things, like do you remember how Aunt Petunia used to go to bridge all the time, then just… stopped going and acts like there never was a bridge club in the first place? Or, Dudley, he had that one toy that looked like some sort of army man, and he took it everywhere, only now it’s not there anymore and Dudders isn’t accusing me of having stolen it or…”

 

“That is the least important thing you could possibly be focusing on right now,” Lenin stated, “Listen to this, it says here that the daemon of children in abusive households generally take…”

 

“No, I think it’s very important,” Lily interjected, “I think… I think it might be eating things out of reality. I mean, I don’t really know where it comes from, I just sort of pulled it out of the ether. I mean for all I know it could be some sort of reality devouring abomination intent on eating Scotland… I think I’ve made a huge mistake.”

 

“Wonderful,” Lenin stated, “At any rate, it says that the daemons of abused children generally shift between forms of predatory mammals, this is theorized to express their unease and growing paranoia and distrust of authority figures…”

 

Lenin then turned the book to show the glossy photograph of a sullen looking boy and a great feral wolf behind him with yellowed fangs and wild bloodshot eyes.

 

“You take the form of a wolf all the time,” Lily pointed out but he was shaking his head.

 

“No, no, this goes on to describe the almost feral behavior, a constant snapping at all hands, scouting of rooms, and in general a marked silence… I’ve never exhibited any of these symptoms,” Lenin said, breathing out and looking quite dazed, before finally admitting, “I’m not sure I have it in me to snarl like a rabid dog.”

 

Well, Lenin didn’t necessarily attack like that but he did… provoke. However, hearing that kind of a thing seemed beneath him so Lily didn’t point it out.

 

“Well, I guess that’s out,” Lily responded but Lenin didn’t even look up, just kept flipping pages until his eyes landed on something but then, then his face paled.

 

“Oh, oh no,” he looked up at her then back down at the page, “This isn’t going to work at all.”

 

“What won’t?”

 

“Lily you can’t… Act,” Lenin finally finished lamely, wincing, and holding up his hands almost in apology, “And this is, this would be subtle stuff… You know what, here’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to provoke Dudley, and let him catch up to us, beat the living hell out of us. Then… Then I’ll… I’ll give you a black eye, and we go to school and we tell them we tripped down the stairs.”

 

Lily stared, stared some more, cast her eyes about the library as if to check that yes, the old librarian with a tabby daemon was still there, then back to Lenin, repeating dully, “We tripped down the… What good will that do?!”

 

“Because then, then we do the same thing again, except this time we get some nice, visible, bruising up the arms, oh maybe around the neck, and again, we say that we tripped down the stairs.”

 

Lily just stared at him, dumbfounded, and repeated, “Lenin, that is the lamest explanation that…”

 

“Of course, it is, that’s why we’re saying it! They will assume that someone told us to keep our mouths shut, because we love our abusive child beating jackass of an uncle, and we would rather tell this obviously, patently false, lie rather than confess the truth.”

 

Lily blinked at him once, twice, then confessed, “That’s a terrible plan.”

 

Lenin, as always whenever anyone questioned Lily’s judgement or Lily questioned his, looked grievously offended, Lily felt like he was compensating for her own strange lack of ego by taking it all for himself, “How is it a terrible plan?”

 

“It involves me getting beat up, by Dudley, for weeks, and you strangling me or hitting me with frying pans, just so that I can tell my teacher, multiple times, that I fell down the stairs,” Lily paused, considered Lenin’s master plan again, and said, “I don’t like the plan.”

 

“Well, if you don’t like the plan, let’s hear yours?”

 

Lily didn’t necessarily have a plan but, “Why don’t we just tell them?”

 

“Tell them?”

 

“Tell them that they lock me in a cupboard and don’t give me nearly as much food as Dudders,” Lily explained, “That seems a lot less painful.”

 

“They will never believe us,” Lenin said, and then, softly, perhaps too softly, “Lily, if they were going to notice, wouldn’t they have done it already?”

 

In the end, for better or worse, they ended up going with Lenin’s plan. And, like Lily had predicted, it hurt, a lot.

 

* * *

 

 

But the trick was not minding that it hurt.

 

* * *

 

 

The ending was… It was what it was, that’s what Lily decided later, and although Lenin would always remain bitter about it, the memory still embroiled within his very being and never really coming to terms with it, he too, more or less, let it go.

 

There was really no point thinking about it.

 

It took about two months, but eventually the bruises starting racking up and after a few really bad self-inflicted injuries where Lenin had misjudged, the government was more than willing to intervene. Aiding this along was the fact that Aunt Petunia had started catching on about two weeks in, and, talking to Uncle Vernon he was convinced more starvation and more belt was the answer.

 

Lenin, naturally, was delighted by this turn of events.

 

He still had Uncle Vernon on some sort of internal death list, but all the same, every day he praised that man’s stupidity and impulsiveness.

 

The day of the social service visit, there was a flurry about the house, the door to the cupboard beneath the stairs locked, Lily placed in a yellow sundress newly bought and a small cardigan to cover her bruised arms.

 

Dudley’s toy room was cleaned rapidly, Dudley screaming and Buddy keening as Aunt Petunia hurriedly shoved newly bought dresses over his old video games and action figures, Sheila braying in dismay, telling him, “Shush, Diddykins, mummy is busy.”

 

Lenin meanwhile, paced anxiously in the form of a jaguar, back and forth, back and forth, eyes on the door and then alerting to attention when the social worker came in. She came, she critically eyed Lily’s sweater, she looked around, and then just like that, she was gone…

 

And Lily and Lenin just stood there, waiting, waiting for something to have happened.

 

Night came, them in the cupboard again, silently sulking together.

 

“We can fall down the stairs a few more times,” Lily said, Lenin saying nothing, spotted tail just swishing back and forth, his back turned towards her and his ears flat as he curled in on himself.

 

“I don’t mind, I’m almost used to it,” Lily said and then, softly, “We can also… We can also just leave, you know.”

 

Still nothing…

 

“Paperwork takes time, they may have to do a few more visits.”

 

Finally, finally, Lenin responded quietly, “If they don’t want us, why do they only threaten the orphanage, why not just send us to one already?”

 

“Have they ever made any sense, Lenin?” Lily asked, then placing a hand in his fur, she sighed and said, “You know what they are, Lenin, as well as I do. They’re… automatons, cheap replications of humanity, close but never quite there, never truly… sentient. If they have any semblance of thought at all, well…”

 

“And if I don’t subscribe to your theory?” Lenin scoffed.

 

“Then why are we in this cupboard, Lenin?” Lily asked, and it said too much, far too much, that he had no legitimate answer to that.

Now, if the universe was a rational place, even filled with magic and bears and northern lights as it was, the story would have ended right there. However, the world was an experiment in the absurd and falling to pieces, so of course, at that moment, the door to the cupboard slowly unlocked and Lily found herself staring at a pair of unfamiliar, thin, legs, and a pair of men’s, scuffed, second-hand oxfords.

 

Against her will Lily was summoned out of the cupboard, pulled by the air itself, Lenin roaring and clawing at the man’s legs but rebuffed by some invisible shield, she was lifted out and found herself silently staring into the pale, pinched face, of a man around her aunt and uncle’s age, who looked down with dark eyes and an indiscernible expression.

 

Oh, his shoulder, there was a dark eyed, brooding, raven, and it said, as Lenin began to circle them, nails cutting into the wood of the floor, swiping desperately and Lily stood there in horror, “Severus.”

 

The man placed a stick against her temple, Lily jerked backwards, kicking him in the shin, shattering his shield and allowing Lenin to bound in only for his eyes to be attacked by the bird. The man muttered something vaguely Latin and ridiculous sounding and both Lenin, and Lily, were frozen still.

 

The man placed a wooden stick, a wand, against her temple.

 

_“Obliviate.”_

 

* * *

 

 

And then just like that, the world seemed to turn backwards, Lily woke back up inside of her cupboard with the pounding headache that she imagined would accompany a hangover, the bruises all having strangely disappeared, and only Lily and Lenin seeming to remember that strange dark, tall, greasy man and his raven daemon had been inside the house at all.

 

And more, none of them seemed to remember the past few months at all.

 

It seemed clear enough that the man had been aiming for Lily to forget too, for her memories to be subjugated to oblivion, but for whatever reason, whether because she herself was a witch or something else entirely, it didn’t seem to stick.

 

So the world moved backward but Lily remained exactly where she’d been before, and they were stuck, at someone else’s whim, inside of Number 4 Privet Drive.

 

Of course, it was because of that, more than anything else, that Lenin started giving zero shits at all...

 

Which probably was an outcome that the strange man in black hadn’t been banking on.

**Author's Note:**

> This was of my own volition but I do like it.
> 
> Thanks for reading, comments, kudos, and bookmarks are greatly appreciated.


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